The sitdown created a firestorm in the week leading up to its broadcast, as many criticized Kelly and her new employer for giving the Infowars host a platform to peddle his conspiracy theories, claims Kelly wasted no time at the top of the show in calling them "baseless allegations [that] aren't just offensive, they're dangerous."

Families of the victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary mass shootings -- which Jones has called a hoax in the past -- pleaded with NBC to scrap the interview. But the network resisted, with Kelly explaining that, in her words, the "incendiary radio host" isn't going away.

"He has millions of listeners and the ear of our current president," Kelly said before tossing to the interview.

The segment lasted about 17 minutes. The end result was an interview that, while pointed and challenging at times, wreaked with the unavoidable stench of damage control, peppered with voiceovers meant to distance the host if not the entire viewing audience from the subject. Soundbites from a father who lost his son in Sandy Hook and conservative writer Charlie Sykes were effective in driving home the point.

"[Jones] has injected this sort of toxic paranoia into the mainstream of conservative thought in a way that would've been inconceivable a couple of decades ago. We're talking about somebody who traffics in the sickest, most offensive types of theories," Sykes said in the most strongly-worded passage in the segment.

Even Tom Brokaw was brought on at the end to add gravitas to the proceedings, just in case you hadn't yet made up your mind about Jones. "We cannot allow the agents of hate to go unchallenged and become the imprint of our time," he said.

In fact, "Sunday Night with Megyn Kelly" spent very little time actually letting Jones speak. And when he did, Jones rambled, blaming the media for distorting his theories while never completely disavowing them.

"I tend to believe that children did probably die there [at Sandy Hook], but then you look at all the other evidence on the other side I could see how other people believe that nobody died there," Jones told Kelly in a type of response she earlier referred to as "classic Alex Jones," which is, "reckless accusations followed by equivocations and excuses."

Critics were divided on the interview.

The website Media Matters, which has been critical of Kelly in the past, said "it could have gone worse," noting, "The segment benefited from devoting very little time to Kelly's interview with Jones, minimizing his opportunity to appeal to her audience."

ABC News legal analyst Dan Abrams praised Kelly, writing on Twitter, "I'm even more convinced that her piece wasn't just OK to do, but important journalism."

Watching @megynkelly interview with Alex Jones, I'm even more convinced that her piece wasn't just ok to do, but important journalism.